Rescued soldier: I was used

JESSICA LYNCH, the former US army supply clerk who became a national icon after
her capture and rescue during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, says she was “used”
by the Pentagon to “show the war was going great”.

Ms Lynch, 22, told Time magazine: “I think I provided a way to boost everybody’s
confidence about the war . . . I was used as a symbol. It doesn’t bother
me anymore. It used to.” Ms Lynch says that her book, I Am a Soldier, Too:
The Jessica Lynch Story, will “set the record straight”.

Ms Lynch said that the television movie of her life was inaccurate. Ms Lynch
said that she hopes to become a teacher. In a few weeks she begins classes at
West Virginia University, where her tuition fees have been paid for by the state.

Ms Lynch, from Palestine, West Virginia, was a private in the US Army when
she was captured in Iraq on March 23, 2003, near al-Nasiriyah, a crossing point
over the Euphrates River. She suffered two spinal fractures, nerve damage and
a shattered right arm, right foot and left leg when her Humvee crashed during
a firefight.

Eleven other soldiers in her unit were killed in the ambush. She was rescued
from an Iraqi hospital by US forces on April 1, 2003 — the first rescue
of an American prisoner of war since the Second World War.

However, accounts of Ms Lynch’s rescue were contradictory and it was
claimed that the rescue was staged.